Salesforce’s Social Marketing Cloud uses its Radian6 assets to track and improve company profiles

Salesforce.com has introduced the Social Marketing Cloud, an effort to get ahead of the rest of the market by using social media to market and sell products to customers.

Social Marketing Cloud employs and builds on assets from Radian6, a social media monitoring company Salesforce picked up earlier this year. As the leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software in the cloud, social media monitoring is crucial to the company’s clout among Web-based businesses.

Five pillars of sociability

Salesforce is supporting the Marketing Cloud on five pillars, which Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff detailed at the company’s Cloudforce event in New York. This new cloud strikes at the heart of Salesforce’s strategy around social, mobile cloud software for businesses.

Marcel LeBrun (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce’s Radian6 unit, discussed the Marketing Cloud pillars with eWEEK ahead of the event.

The first component of Marketing Cloud is Radian6’s social monitoring software, LeBrun said. Radian6 “listens” to more than 150 million sources, such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs on the Web, to help customers get a handle on not only what is being said about their company, but what is being said about industry rivals.

Social monitoring’s function is delivering chief marketing officers (CMOs) information to get a competitive advantage by knowing the way their business is perceived. Salesforce is charging $600 (£382) a month per deployment for social monitoring software.

The next pillar is social insights, or the ability to go deeper into industry knowledge about a brand. Social insights pulls capabilities from some of the best insights technologies in the world.

The Marketing Cloud will include influence analysis from Klout and intention analysis from OpenAmplify, as well as OpenCalais’ mentions of places, products and other objects. Customers can pay for those insights, which are priced at $60 (£38) per user, per month and are available now.

The next pillar, social engagement, is another Radian6 technology. LeBrun said his team has added a software extensions library, such as hottest memes or topics; Facebook management capabilities to let employees respond to conversations on their Facebook page from Radian6; and one-click Salesforce integration.

This last effort lets any conversation happening in Radian6 be turned into a contact or a case on Salesforce with a single click.

A brand-new product, and the next pillar, is the social hub, Salesforce’s stab at a workflow and process automation application. This is an important component that connects social applications to other enterprise systems that customers use.

“How do you scale the 20,000 conversations per day and get precisely those conversations about this product to that product manager?” LeBrun said.

Social hub, which is available in limited release for $1,200 (£763) per deployment, per month, will build a social profile and contact record inside Salesforce CRM about anyone talking about a particular product.

The last pillar, SiteForce, is a development platform based on Salesforce’s Heroku platform. This is a drag-and-drop development tools studio that lets businesses build their Websites entirely in the cloud. SiteForce costs $9,900 (£6,297) per year.